So there we were waiting the hours that have to pass between the time when you check in for a international flight and when the plane actually takes off.
Now as nice as the departures section of OR Tambo is, doing it with two extremely tired children is not to be recommended. Charlotte was well behaved but Devon, as soon as his attention was captured by an item, be it a display of chocolates in duty free, an aeroplane or a truck traversing the runway he was fixed to the spot. Neither promises of greater treasures down the road or threats of finding a naughty chair. stair or spot in the airport would move the little fellow from his chosen spot. And if you were to threaten to leave him behind he quietly lay down on the floor. Not screaming hysterically, until I picked him up though.
Eventually we made it to the gate and we could relax a bit as a nice old Mancunian entertained both Charlotte and Devon while we waited for the plane.
Eventually we boarded and considering that this was their first time flying both were well behaved.
Schipol was great, as far as airports can be great and eventually we hit Dublin airport.
We sailed through customs and immigration and found Zoe. Leigh and the boys outside waiting for us.
A quick detour to McDonalds and we were soon on our way in 2 cars from the airport to Port Laoise.
]]>I was just looking at the best seller list at Exclusive Books (local large chain bookstore) and I noticed an interesting thing. Right at the top of the Best Seller list were two books by the same author:
Now I haven't read the second one yet but Spud is a work of brilliance, clever and funny at the same time. For those that haven't heard of Spud it follows his life through the first, and now second year in a boarding school in South Africa. For those who want a simplistic analogy think Harry Potter meets Adrian Mole without any magic. But I think this book os more of an adult read than a young adult read.
Of course next month Harry Potter will be on top but I wonder how long it will be before order is restored and Spud takes his place at the top of the pile again.
The letter I sent to the council. Lets see what their response is.
To whom it may concern
Regarding Account XXX
I am writing regarding the latest bill from the City of Johannesburg where you have added not only a disconnection and reconnection fee for my electricity that was, in my opinion erroneously cut off, but also have added, what I assume to be, an additional deposit which is not only not accounted for on the statement but has been added into the 30 day running total thus illegally incurring interest.
I will deal with these to issues separately.
1. The disconnection of my electricity.
On the 25th of May one of your contractors arrived at my premises, 30 Nourse Street Discovery, to disconnect my electricity. I was told that this was because there was an amount of RXXX outstanding.
On the 30th of April I received a letter telling me there was an amount of RXXX outstanding which had to be paid immediately. I had already paid an amount of RXXX that month (which should have negated the need to cut me off) but on receiving the letter I paid an additional amount of RXXX just to be safe.
On the 25th of May when I called the call centre I was told that an additional amount of RXXX has since the issuing of that letter fallen into arrears.
The letter dated 30 April 2007 made no reference to having to pay up the full account and since I had no final demand for the amount of RXXX be paid I see no reason why I should have been cut off with, effectively, no warning whatsoever.
I therefore consider that the disconnection was executed in error and therefore request that you reverse both the disconnection and reconnection fees immediately and that any interest that has been charged on these amounts be reversed as well.
2. The additional amount
My account now shows an amount owing in the 30 days column of just over RXXX. But if you examine the balance brought forward and the three credits on the account you will see that it is impossible for any amount to be in the 30 days column as the credits total up to more than the balance brought forward.
If this is an additional deposit caused by the erroneous disconnection then I would appreciate it if it too could be reversed and any interest be reversed as well.
I will be paying the outstanding amount for services rendered this month but not the disconnection, reconnection or the amount in the 30 days column until we have resolution on this issue.
Please feel free to contact me with any queries.
Kind regards
Ben Kelly
I listened to a podcast of "In Our Time" a few days ago. The show picks a topic and with Melvyn Bragg moderating a few academics discuss it in a language that ordinary people understand. This time the topic was "Victorian Pessimism" and they started it with a quote from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach".
I was shocked by how much that single stanza of a poem, written over 150 years ago could resonate with me today.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
I feel like I am stuck in the same position where the new world is opening up before me and it should provide the promise of a better life. I just can't see that better life. With all the technological and scientific advancements that are happening I should be dancing on the rooftops singing the praises of this new world, but instead I am sitting at my computer wondering when the world is going to collapse around us.
i always thought I was an optimist, thinking that everything would work out in the end, but I think that I have to accept that I am a pessimist and the only joy I will have will come from my family and we need to work hard to pull ourselves through increasingly difficult times which will lie ahead.
The full poem
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
I am sick of electricity, all it seems to do is cause me endless grief. Well
I suppose I shouldn't blame electricity but this last year all I seem to have is hassles from electrically powered devices. Washing machines, Fridges, Pool filters, Computers and the list goes on.
I have already gone over part one of the story and I was waiting for this month's bill to arrive because I knew that they had screwed up in disconnecting me and were going to hit me with some kind of penalty fee and today the bill arrives.
First the whack me with a R344 disconnection fee and a R344 reconnection fee. They also increase the deposit I have to pay but to add insult to injury they don't add this onto the current balance (where you don't get charged interest) they put it onto the 30 day balance where they do charge interest.
I am in the process of composing a letter to the council disputing this and will post when I get a reply.
If I wasn't so horribly addicted to the Internet I would wish for the simple life, all of a sudden living off-grid looks really good.
I felt the full force of incompetent bureaucracy on Friday. I was a little late on paying the electricity bill and so I got a letter telling me to pay R1400 or they would come around and cut off the lights. Being the good citizen and quite liking my heater I coughed up the amount they were asking for and more.
However, on Friday, a nice man arrives at my gate while I am at work to turn off the electricity. Calling the Jo'burg Connect call centre connects me to someone called Siyabonga who tells me that even though the first amount outstanding had been settled an additional amount had fallen into arrears and apparently they operate on a one strike and you're out principle. So they warn you once and if you fall into arrears again then you get cut off, because they have already warned you.
Now this happens on a Friday afternoon and I get told that the earliest I can be reconnected is Monday, even if I pay the amount outstanding immediately.
So I pay the money and am very stressed about having no power for the entire weekend.
A little later I call the contact centre again and speak to another lady who is much nicer who goes and checks that the fax confirming payment has been received and then puts me into the queue for reconnection and tells me that the teams work until 10pm and if they get to my number on the list that night then I will be reconnected.
Very different from the other fool who said that the teams get given a list of reconnections at 3PM and anyone that pays on Friday only gets put onto the list on Monday.
So I go home and wait and before the winter sun sets the guys arrive and reconnect the power, apparently they work until 11pm and on Saturday.
Not only was I incorrectly disconnected but I also had to deal with an idiot that not only didn't know what he was talking about but gave me attitude as well. I just wish I could fire the municipality, but until they up the output on those solar panel I will just have to take my cold porridge and eat it lumps and all.
I am still formulating my letter of complaint to the mayor.
So there I was in Valencia for a media round table with Larry Elison, head honcho at Oracle. xcept that instead of the roundtable being at a boring hotel like they usually are, this one was on board Rinsing Sun, Larry's personal yacht, over 100m long.
So we weren't allowed to take pics onboard Rising Sun because it is his home and how would you like a bunch of nosy journalists poking around your house takeing photos but I need to write this down somewhere and I will try to paint as good a picture as I can with words and post one or two exterior pics later on.
So we took the boat out to Rising Sun, which is too big to bring into the pleasure boat harbour at Valencia and we docked at the back of Rising Sun. The back is a wide deck with two large doors that swing up when the boat is stationary and lock into position when the water is rough or the boat is moving. These are very thick doors with bolts that lock them into position when they are closed.
So we had to take our shoes off there because, as with all yachts, they don't want the deck to get marked. Then it was up a flight of stairs to the first deck. This is quite small there is a room, which was closed, and a few outdoor chairs in a reddish finish with off-white cushions on them and a hot tub sunk into the deck. I guess that sundowners from there must be something special.
Up another deck and there is the basketball court and the sports room. Again this was closed but the court is a nice size and there is nothing cluttering up the space here.
Up another deck was as far as we got to go. This is what looks like the main entertainment area, with more outdoor furniture clustered around. there are also two large sets of cushions forming a square ( a bit like a chessboard of ottomans 2.5m square). All of this is very functional, not gaudy or brash in any way. There was a long outdoor table that we used for the meeting and we squashed about 20 odd people around the table.
Inside the lounge area there is another lounge suite which almost had a 70's feeling to it. the whole area was done in a brownish decor and all looked very plush and comfortable. On the far left of the lounge there was a long dining room table probably capable of seating just over 20 people around it.
Directly in front is a stone clad wall and to the left is a wide hallway running down the left side of the boat. I didn't get much further than that.
What I did get to see was the bathroom for that section, which had under-lit marble floors and a much more modern, trendy feel than the lounge area. The toilet itself was a metal base with a wooden top, but I think that has more to do with the fact that it was on a boat than a style choice.
Despite the size of the boat and the clear luxury nature of the fittings, the whole aim seems to have been to build a comfortable home, rather than trying to impress people by going over the top. I do wonder at what point you start to get used to having a large staff of people always around you. I guess that once you get a large house you start with a housekeeper and then a gardener and then a cook and then someone else and soon enough you have a staff of 40 looking after you on your luxury yacht.
Considering how successful Oracle has been as a company it is hard to fault the accommodation he has chosen.
If money were no object, which five luxury items would you rush right out and buy?
Submitted by lorilyn.
Oh well this should be relativelly easy.
A medium sized HD LCD TV. I would guess around 37" would do. Anything bigger would dwarf my lounge and anything smaller woudln't really be a big screen. I don't want one with any fancy functionality built in, just the highest possible resolution and awesome picture quality.
A 24" iMac for my study, I played with one a while ago and it was just awesome, big screen fast processor, big hard drive and plenty of RAM. I can watch movies in the study as well as get work done, it is the prefect, not too noisy work machine. I though about putting a big Mac Pro here but I am not sure I like desktop machines anymore. But if I went that route an 8-core mac pro with a zillion GB of RAM and even more hard drive space and a 30" LCD screen.
A 15" Macbook Pro fully loaded. I need a laptop for the road and this is the best thing on the market by far.
An Apple TV. This is a thing of simplicity and beauty, who could not want it.
A Canon 30D Digital SLR and accessories. This would have to include flashes and lenses. I love my photography and having some kick ass kit would really let me focus on this.
So what we have ascertained is that if Ben went shopping with lots of money Apple would do very well out of the deal. If I got to add one thing more to the list and this may even supplant the Apple TV and that would be an Audi RS4 Avant. I love cars that look normal and go fast and this is the ultimate one of those.
Sorry if this is unimaginative or badly composed but I am writing while cooking supper so I have an excuse.
In your ultimate dream house, what does your favorite room look like?
I could answer this question any number of ways, I could go for the kitchen all hi-tech and shiny or the lounge with comfy couches and a kick ass TV, but I think that I would have to go with the study.
This would be a big room, with a desk at one end of the room and floor to ceiling windows, with french doors in the middle leading out onto the garden, at the other end of the room. The desk would be a cherry wood colour with a large leather chair behind it. On all the walls there are floor to ceiling bookcases almost all full of books with a section dedicated to first editions and a pile of old leather bound old classics just to add some class to the room.
The room has to be north facing (this is the southern hemisphere, geographically dsadvataged readers can reverse that) so that it get sun all day in winter and morning and evening sun in summer. It also needs to be long enough that the sun doesn't touch the desk at any time of the year.
At the sunny end of the room there needs to be a massive armchair, the most comfortable ever constructed, which can be used for reading on, and for taking a nap whenever the desire occurs. Basically this is a room where serious work can be done in comfort, and where naps can be taken with no chance of interuption.
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